


Thin Lines

by oswhine



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War I, F/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 20:49:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oswhine/pseuds/oswhine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Smith is world-weary soldier in WW1. He is visited by a glowing, golden girl, maybe his guardian angel, maybe his savior, maybe his guiding light. Maybe he'll never know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thin Lines

**Author's Note:**

> As I was pondering what to name this, I was listening to the song 'Angel Eyes' by Emmylou Harris (because I'm obsessed with her Christmas album) so the name comes from some lyrics in that song: "Thin lines you've been living on." 
> 
> Also, this is a wartime AU, so there is some death, and some violence, but it isn't that graphic. 
> 
> Also also I'm obsessed with RosexNine right now. I love them. 
> 
> Also also also I tried to make this as accurate as possible, but if you spot something that's wrong, let me know!

The first time he saw her was when he had Trench Fever. He was at the height of it, the fever peaking, every one of his senses a blur. And then: cool hands on his face, on his cheeks. He struggled to open his eyes, the fever dragging him down, but he could see her, a golden face, illuminated by light, smiling at him. _A nurse_...he thought, before the fog of his fever surrounded him again. 

But when he recovered, he did not see her face in any of the girls tending to him. 

“Is there a blonde nurse here?” He asked one day, as one of them plumped up his pillow. 

“Blonde? No, love. We’re all brunettes here. Although there is Amelia, she’s a redhead.” 

His next thought was that she was a fever dream. A spectre, coaxed from his mind to reassure him, like all the other men, talking about their girls back home on nights staring up at the painfully sharp stars. Back home, he had no one. Maybe she was wish, a wish to fill that empty space only realised in a delusional state. 

He would dream about her now, too, remembering no details, just the softness of her face, the golden light that had flowed from her. 

When he was released back to the front line, the nurses smiling sadly at him when he went, he was convinced that was all she had ever been. 

At soon as they got close and he caught that smell, that nightmare smell, he felt as if he had never left. The fever had been a respite, the dull aches he had experienced in hospital nothing to a numb day in the trench. 

Jack, his only friend, was there, waiting for him. He was his friend only because Jack was friends with everybody, even those who wouldn’t let people close, like himself. 

“See some pretty girls in the hospital?” Jack asked, clapping a hand on his back. “They sure are cute in their little caps, aren’t they?” 

He didn’t say anything. 

“Well, I’m supposed to tell you you’re relieved from the night’s work. You can go straight to bed, you lucky bastard.” 

He couldn’t see Jack’s grin through the dark but he knew it was there. 

As he sat on the side of his bed that night, she came to him again. She sat beside him, whispered in his ear, “Goodnight, Doctor.” 

“Won’t you go away?” He hissed through clenched teeth. “You’re not real.” He rolled onto his side, but not before seeing her small, sad smile. He prayed that the fever was returning but he felt more lucid than ever. He did not sleep that night and was still wide awake when they were woken at dawn. 

They all lined up in the trench. This time of day was the most beautiful and the most frightening, his ears listening for both Death’s soft tread and enemy machine guns. Jack often joked - well, about a lot of things, but he said that John’s ears were large enough he would be the first one to know, and that was why he always stood by him. 

But he wasn’t the only one standing next to John that morning. She was there too, the golden girl, clearer now as the sun rose. She was soft, and beautiful, and exhaling light as if she were the sun’s daughter.

John looked around, wondering if anyone else could see her. 

“What is it?” Jack asked beside him. “Do you hear something?” 

John looked at the girl. 

“What?” asked Jack again, following his line of his vision. But John could see in his eyes that he was blind to the girl. 

“Nothing.” He said. 

He wasn’t scared easily, but this girl made him feel like he was a child again, shivering after a nightmare. He pointedly kept his eyes on the horizon, steadying himself by it. 

“Don’t be afraid, Doctor,” she said, as if she could hear his thoughts. 

“Why do you keep calling me that?” He asked under his breath. “I’m a soldier, not a doctor.” 

“No you’re not,” she said, “Not really. That’s not who you are. You hate this, you hate all this death. You purposefully aim to miss, but no one’s noticed yet. You want to save every person, no matter whose side they’re on. That’s why I call you the Doctor.” 

When he turned around she was gone again. 

She unsettled him. He thought about her all day, through inspection and as he refilled sandbags. 

The next time she appeared was a few days later. He, Jack, and a few other men had been sent out, their hearts in their stomachs, to No Man’s Land to mend the barbed wire, the flimsy fence that was expected to keep the enemy out. But they believed in it more than they believed in God, these days. 

Suddenly she was walking beside him, as if she always had been. She took his hand, her skin warm this time, heating his own. She didn’t say anything as they tramped through the cold mud, and she stood silently behind him as he worked on the cobweb of barbed wire. For once, he couldn’t feel the sweat on the back of his neck. When he stood up, finished, she kissed him once on the cheek, and then was gone. 

He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but that night, as he reached out for sleep, hoping it would take his hand in return, he wished she would come back soon. Maybe she was a hallucination, a sign of his madness, but she was a flame of hope in the wasteland that had become his life. And maybe, although he had even more trouble admitting this, she was all he had. 

One morning the man next to him was killed. He fell to his knees like a man praying. Already, a rat, gorged on hate, came sniffing towards his body, but John knelt beside him and poked the rat sharply with his bayonet, so that it scampered away, easily giving up because it knew there was lots more to feed on. He closed the man’s eyelids over his stunned, glassy eyes, and laid a hand on his forehead. 

“John!” He heard Jack cry over the cracking of bullets splitting the morning air, “He’s dead! Help the living!” 

So John stood up and as he did he heard her voice in his ear; “Listen to him.” 

“What’s your name?” He asked quietly, firing at the dirt in the middle of No Man’s Land, sending a smattering of it flying into the air. He knew they were killing them, the men who stood shoulder to shoulder with him, but he couldn’t bring himself to kill a man who could easily be himself, his gun aimed at the sky, at the dirt, anywhere but another man’s heart, or a boy, scared just to be there, the only difference between them language. 

“Some call me the Bad Wolf,” she breathed, “But you can call me Rose.” 

“Are an angel? My guardian angel?” 

“You don’t believe in angels, though, do you Doctor?” 

“No,” he said, “I don’t.” 

And when he ducked down, hiding from bullets flying like darts for his face, she was gone. 

That night, as he was getting ready for bed beside Jack, him and Jack, always together, he noticed something. 

“What happened to your foot?” He asked the other man, pausing in his routine. It looked swollen, blisters on the heels and the sides. 

“Nothing,” replied Jack quickly, moving so that his feet were out of sight behind his bed. 

But John remembered stories and Rose’s words that morning, urging him to listen to Jack, to help the living. 

“That looks like Trench Foot to me,” he said. 

“It’s nothing, John, let it go,” Jack said, sighing. 

“You should get that checked out.” 

“Look, I’m fine, alright?” Jack snapped. But John wondered whether he was angry at him or at his weakness. He thought about how Jack had always looked out for him, despite the fact that he was always cold towards him. 

The next morning he told their sergeant what he had seen and Jack was taken away. No one stood beside him now. 

No one but Rose. 

“You did right,” she told him, her words brushing away the doubts crawling up his neck. 

He said nothing. 

She sat next to him in the trench a few days later, cold and wet in the mud, and he asked: “Why are you here? Why me?” 

She only smiled that enigmatic smile that told him nothing. 

But she was always there, following him, insubstantial as a ghost. Her presence was comforting, and he found himself, during the endless days, often reaching out to touch her, his touchstone. She felt more real than the world around him, sometimes. Rose. He had given up questioning her, wondering what she was. She just was. That was enough. 

And she was there when a bullet caught him on the shoulder, biting into his skin, and he sunk down into the mud with a moan. She sung to him. A lullaby. But it wasn’t to soothe him into the endless sleep of death, he wasn’t there yet. She was telling him she was there for him. 

He went to the field hospital, the wound was declared minor, the bullet removed, and he returned to the front. 

A few days later Jack came back. He’d had his toes amputated, he told John. But he forgave him. John could see it in his eyes.

Then came the battle. They’d been about to be sent to support, relief from the front line and the terror breathing down their necks. But John had been scared of that too, a different type of fear, scared that Rose would leave him as he left the danger. But now he didn’t have to worry. He only had to survive. 

He didn’t want to fight. He never had. Even as a boy, he never had, as the other children pulled the legs off flies and cut up worms to see if they would still wiggle for fun, he had refused to. His family had thought him unnatural. But why was it unnatural for him to not want to cause pain? He should have been declared unfit for service, because the coward in him would win his inner battles every day. He wasn’t scared of dying; he was scared that he wouldn’t even be able to kill to protect the people he cared about from death. If he saw a sniper aiming his gun at Jack, Jack who always stood by him, would he be able to coax his shaking hands to shoot him, or would he just call out, his words ringing out too late, the coward’s way? 

He still wasn’t sure as he crawled on his stomach through the dirt, trying to drown out the sounds of bullets and screams. He couldn’t. 

Then a gun cracked and he heard Death hissing in his ear, and he thought, _oh well_ , just that, _oh well_ , because he knew it was going to happen sometime and why not now? 

But then something strange happened. 

He was surrounded by a glowing, golden cocoon, and the bullet never reached him. 

Now it was Rose’s voice in his ear, saying “I just want you safe. My Doctor.” 

“Why?” He yelled, not caring who heard him. “What’s so special about me? What do I do that makes me so worth preserving now?” 

“You don’t get it, do you,” was all she said, her voice fading with the words and the golden glow around him. 

He survived the battle without a scratch. Every bullet left in his gun. 

Jack lost his hearing in his right ear. “It’s great, actually,” he said loudly to John when he went to visit him at the base hospital, “The perfect excuse to get people to pamper me. You’ll see, when this war is over, I’ll be a fat, happy cat. And hey, it could have been worse - it was only one ear!” 

John thought Jack was braver than he could ever be, even with Rose at his side. 

The war ended soon after. But John didn’t feel like celebrating with the rest of the men. All he could think about were the men whose bodies still lay in the soil, the ones whose families were crying and asking God why, and looking for a reason. And that he was still here, undeserving of the luxury of living. 

Jack remained his only friend. Jack had many friends who always sat on his left side. 

And when the nightmares came, Rose was there, curled in his arms, whispering “It’s ok, it’s ok,” until it was. 

Those was the only times he saw her now; when the pain got to be too much that he could barely breathe. It was worth it, just for those kind eyes and that soft smile and that gentle touch. 

He lived.


End file.
